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Never a dull moment for Coquille’s police chief

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Since taking the job last July, Mark Dannels has dealt with department corruption and a surge in criminal activity

By Winston Ross

The Register-Guard

Appeared in print: Monday, April 6, 2009, page A1

COQUILLE — It is just after lunch on a rainy spring day on the Southern Oregon coast, and the newest member of this town’s seven-man police force is sucking down a Diet Pepsi, trying to drive the image of a dead body out of his mind.

It’s Mark Dannels’ third corpse this week. None of them may ultimately involve criminal charges, but they all weigh on the police chief, who is eight months into the job. The first death was a heart attack. A man keeled over during the middle of an argument with a neighbor. Instead of calling 911, Dannels said, the neighbor left him there to die. The next was from choking. This morning’s appears to be the result of natural causes, Dannels said. Regardless, it’ll take a little time to erase the image from his mind.

It also may be difficult to forget the crime spree that has kept this town’s fast-talking police chief hopping from one investigation to the next. Coquille’s crime statistics since Dannels, 45, arrived in rainy Oregon from sunny Arizona last July are higher in that nine-month period than they were the four years combined prior to him showing up.

Two officers resigned in the past three months after their separate arrests. One was later convicted of stealing from the evidence locker. The other was arrested on suspicion of providing alcohol to a minor in Coos Bay, a case that hasn’t yet gone to trial.

The high school track coach was arrested on sex charges. A group of local teenagers robbed a Safeway at gunpoint. A man was charged with negligent homicide after he was alleged to have shot his wife in the head during an argument. A convicted sex offender allegedly raped a Coquille woman after his release from the state penitentiary. A Coquille woman was charged with stealing $11,000 from a Project Graduation fund and with robbing a bank.

And, right after Dannels returned from checking on a local nurse whom he found lying face down in the foyer of her home, a man pulled up to the police department in an old Chevy Blazer. He walked into the department and said he needed to talk to the chief. When asked if the material was sensitive, the man replied “Child abuse. And murder.”

“It’s been incredible,” Dannels said. “It just never ends.”

From Day One

After more than 20 years with the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department in Bisbee, Ariz., Dannels decided it was time for a new challenge when he applied for the opening in Coquille. That’s exactly what he got.

Dannels inherited a police force that already was under intense community scrutiny. Disgruntled residents formed the “Concerned Citizens of Coquille” and staged protests outside City Hall two years ago because they were unhappy with the police department. And residents kept the pressure on Dannels’ predecessor, Michael Reaves, about an arrest gone wrong last January that left a Coquille man paralyzed from the neck down. Reaves resigned, citing health problems.

The Arizona transplant had his work cut out for him from Day One. He set about trying to reestablish the police department’s connection with the town. He held a community-wide meeting to hear people’s concerns about the department. And he drafted a seven-page set of performance expectations for each of his officers, requiring that they sign it if they wanted to continue working there.

Dannels assigned his officers to do more foot patrols and community policing. He also made it a point to get out of the office each day to interact with the public. The department’s daily briefings often are held at a local business over a round of sodas, to increase visibility.

The cops set up a “Shop With Heroes” day, a joint effort with the town’s fire department, to allow underprivileged children in the community to go on a spending spree at a local Wal-Mart, using $8,000 raised from community donations for the children to buy toys for themselves or necessities for their families.

But these rewarding efforts have had to be squeezed in among a rash of high-profile crimes, the likes of which a town with 4,100 people rarely sees.

‘Overwhelming’ pace

The Safeway robbery happened Jan. 15. Five teenagers hid in the bathroom until after the grocery closed and then took the night employees hostage at gunpoint. The teens escaped to California. But two of them came back later in the day and were quickly arrested after police found incriminating text messages describing their plot and their activities on their cell phones.

“By 6 p.m. that night, we had all five in custody,” Dannels said.

Then in February, high school track coach Wendi Boutiette was arrested on suspicion of sexually abusing one of her athletes. Dannels said the decision to arrest and charge the coach came only after close consultation with the county district attorney. But the coach’s Roseburg attorney, David Terry, singled out the chief for criticism, suggesting that he’s new on the job and a little trigger-happy when it comes to showing he’s tough on crime.

Dannels says he’s frustrated that he can’t defend himself, but the case hasn’t gone to trial yet so he has to keep mum on the investigation for fear of tipping the prosecution’s hand.

“I’ll have my day in court,” Dannels said.

The new chief finds the busy caseload a little exhilarating. But he also has another word for the past eight months — “overwhelming” — and more so because two of his big cases involved a quarter of his staff as suspects. It was tough enough to see two officers arrested, he said, but it also means he has to personally cover a shift until a replacement can be found.

So when a call crackled over the police scanner on Thursday that a woman failed to pull over when an officer flashed his lights at her for speeding through downtown, Dannels jumped out of his chair, grabbed his jacket and hopped in his unmarked car to join the chase. As it turned out, the woman was an officer’s sister. She said she was late for an appointment and didn’t see the flashing lights. She got a ticket.

“We treat everybody the same here,” Dannels said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a business person or a drug dealer.”

Change in perception

It’s that attitude that meant no special treatment for the officers accused of committing crimes, Dannels said. When the chief first got to town, he asked Officer Randy Ulmer for an audit of the evidence room, which Ulmer supervised. Then he asked again, and again.

It wasn’t until two sums of cash — $150 and more than $10,000 — turned up missing that Dannels suspected Ulmer was stealing evidence. But once that determination was made, there was no question that he’d be arrested, Dannels said.

Same goes for Officer James Bryant, who’s now accused of providing alcohol to a Coos Bay minor and soliciting the girl to have sex with him.

Dian Courtright, who runs the Concerned Citizens’ blog, suggests that Dannels was unfortunate to inherit a “corrupt” police force and said she is glad the new chief is setting things right.

“Mark is cleaning up the department,” she said. “I really have a lot of respect for him, so far.”

As far as Dannels is concerned, the officers’ cases aren’t any more a pattern than is the spike in crime of late. There may be more nefarious activity in town because of the declining economy, but it also may be that people trust the police force now and are willing to come forward with information, he said.

Before, “People wouldn’t even call. They didn’t feel confident anything would get done,” Dannels said. “I had to change that perception.”

The town’s city manager, Terence O’Connor, said he’s pleased with Dannels’ performance so far.

“He’s doing an excellent job,” O’Connor said. “He’s engaged in the community; he exhibits a lot of characteristics you want to see in all employees.”

Dannels is hopeful that things will slow down. The freckles from his Arizona suntan have given way to a “pasty” complexion, and he’s put on 20 pounds since he took the job, he said. The boss’ huge jar of jelly beans are part of the problem, Dannels says, ribbing O’Connor in the same way he does when squeezing the squealing stuffed monkey the chief keeps on his desk to heckle the city manager during budget meetings. The chief calls it his “Terence monkey,” and it’s apparent from their banter that the two have a sense of humor in common, which has proved to be infectious.

“You can walk through here and hear people laughing,” said Robert Jump, editor of the Coquille Community News.